Teaching Creative Thinking Skills: A Longitudinal Study

With an increasing degree of complexity in the retail business, future business success for retail professionals will likely require creative problem-solving abilities. Therefore, there is a need for retail merchandising programs to emphasize creative problem solving because creativity can be learned. In this study, we share how an undergraduate-level creative problem-solving class is designed and implemented to enhance retail merchandising students’ creative problem-solving skills. A longitudinal analysis of creativity scores of 45 undergraduate students in a retail merchandising program was conducted to test both short-term and long-term effects of creative problem-solving training on students’ creativity scores. The results provide support for creativity training.